I had been asked to take over a few times during those previous handoffs but wasn’t feeling up for it for various reasons around lifestyle and bad decision making. I took it over in 2012 and have been running the show with my wife, novelist Alexis von Konigslow, ever since.

What makes your poetry series different from other existing ones in Toronto?

A lot of those series don’t include windows and we have a rather large window.

Beyond the window, I would say Pivot is a rather blissfully unadorned series. Pivot contains no hyphens. It doesn’t do any reach out beyond the world of poetry and fiction and the occasional non-fict. It doesn’t try to be anything more than what it is. This is a big fucking city, you know? There is something out there for you no matter how weird and eccentric your tastes are, and so Pivot is there for that group of people: statistically insignificant until stretched across the landscape of a metropolis, who like to drink beer and be read to in the dark. So I would say that Pivot is very proudly niche in a way that might be unique, and that’s the only way I could ever have it. Some nights it’s just me, my hangdog Andy Kaufmann schtick, and the only room full of people in this whole city I can stand. It’s a small target and we want to nail it.

Do you use different approach when you work with emerging artists vs established ones?

There are no such things as “established artists” in poetry. The only two kind of poets are emerging and deceased.

But if you’re talking about age or publication record, then no. The new poets are generally better readers than the older poets, is all I can think of.

Is working with emerging poets more challenging than working with established ones? Could you elaborate on what makes working with emerging poets unique?

Okay, so let’s throw out my quick “No” above, and assume meaning for the term “emerging poets,” and that it means, roughly: young poets who haven’t published books. I will say that they should know that they are the best moment Canadian poetry has ever had. The generation of poets born, I’ll say, between 1984 and 1993 (let us be shits and call them “The Mulroney Poets”) are the most consistently interesting and deepest and most outrageously ambitious group we’ve ever seen. I’ve tried to articulate why this may be and have at best, two theories.

One, they have the opportunity, if they wish to take it, to be completely over the idea of “Canada.” We spent a long time in the literary culture of this country trying to figure out how to be simultaneously liberal and nationalist, and it didn’t work out because that’s an inherently bullshit position. The first big generation of Canadian writers, the boomers and their slightly older siblings, fought on and on about that. Dennis Lee is a hero of mine and a good friend but the battle he supposed in geopolitical terms in, say, Civil Elegies, or the one rendered in ecological terms by Farley Mowat, those have all been lost. These Mulroney kids are coming into adulthood at a time where the moral and environmental apocalypse being furthered by Canada is greater than the one being furthered by every other Western country. They are coming up in the only period in any living person’s memory where the Canadian Prime Minister sits to the right of the American President, and so much of that disco nationalism stuff demanded a Good Canada/Bad America dialectic. Which is no way to build a national culture, as it depends on the cultures of other nations to exist. So I would say that, though they are inexorably fucked in all the meaningful economic and moral ways, the end of a cultural Canada does them a lot of good as poets. There’s a bigger world out there.

And secondly, there’s a bigger world out there. I think that this group is so used to the repetitive smashing together of cultural products: near and far, high and low, old and new, that the reach of their metaphors can be so much more ambitious and natural than for poets born even a few years earlier. A lot of this is the internet but it’s also the Internet of Thoughts, you know. It’s how those technological gadgets reconfigure the brain if you’re young enough to be born into them. Juxtaposition is finished, I think, it doesn’t exist anymore. So you get crazy shit happening out there with people like Kayla Czaga and Michael Prior and Vincent Colistro (or Jessica Bebenek or Liz Howard or all those people in Vancouver) where an amount of figurative reach that might seem showy or performative for even our more culturally-literate older poets (McGimpsey, Rogers, Babstock) just flow off the tongue and there’s no ta-dah attached, it’s just culture speaking.

Your website mentions that you receive no funding other than PWYC – how do you make that work and how can others who might be interested in starting out in that environment manage that?

I pass a bucket at the break and people are encouraged to put money in the bucket. At the end of the break I take the money out of the bucket and divide it equally between all the readers. Simple. Anyone can do it. But we’re entertaining the idea of going out for public funding, in the interest of paying those readers more money.

In your opinion, what are the gaps/opportunities in Toronto’s poetry scene? What kind of work doesn’t get as much celebration as it should?

We are very lucky in Toronto. It’s a good scene and a generally welcoming world. If you were so inclined, you could go out and see something decent every night of the week. I would say that we lack people willing to do the less-glamourous work of scene buttressing, but that’s not unique to the city or to poetry. Nobody likes to fill out forms or cold-call venues or comparison shop for paper.

My big worry is probably, with the growth of unfunded internships and the like, is that much of that work becomes the speciality of rich people’s kids and grandkids. And we already have such a demographic problem in poetry (I’ll let spoken word off the hook on this generalization), it’s so Caucasian and upper-middle class and socioeconomically riskless already that I’m concerned that another thirty years of filtering out Grown Up White Trash like myself will render it static.

What are Pivot’s plans in the near future as a poetry series, e.g. whether or not you are envisioning any changes to Pivot’s scope or focus?

More younger poets this year. Also, I think we’ll bring in fewer readers with brand-new books. I’d like to have people do Pivot like 6 months after their book is out, otherwise it just gets lost in the rush of readings and releases and you end up with, like, four opportunities to go hear a given poet read in a week. We’re going to drift out of that game.